Consumers continue to enjoy online shopping due in part to the ability to shop from nearly any location, including their home, at nearly any time. However, product photographs oftentimes do not provide a consumer with a level of information about a product that is sufficient to convince a consumer to purchase an item and/or is sufficient to increase consumer comfort with decisions to purchase merchandise online. This is especially true in the areas of personal articles, such as apparel or footwear, and household décor items, but also holds true for nearly any type of merchandise available for purchase online.
To provide consumers with more complete photographic representations of products, some online retailers provide manipulatable three-dimensional images, that is, images that can be viewed from any vantage points surrounding the image upon a consumer turning and rotating the image to simulate such vantage points. Generally speaking, such three-dimensional images are stitched together from a large variety of photographs of an item using a variety of photogrammetry techniques and/or existing photogrammetry software programs. However, considering the number of images needed to prepare a three-dimensional images multiplied by the hundreds, if not thousands or more, products sold online by a typical online retailer, the time typically required to capture such photographs to create three-dimensional images is often impractical for use on more than a select number of products. In addition, many of these photogrammetry techniques do not fully represent texture, finish, etc. or other finer points of merchandise that are necessary to more completely allow a potential consumer to inspect the merchandise online before making a purchase or a purchase decision.